This 2003 Portuguese feature by Jose Carlos de Oliveira begins as a no-frills war film set in 1972 Mozambique, then evolves (or devolves) into a fairly good action adventure flick as a black prisoner and a white soldier trek across the bush, joined eventually by a white military nurse. From that point it becomes a fairly thin if irony-laden study of the endlessly bickering characters, which ultimately capsizes with fatuous American Graffiti-style texts explaining their respective fates. Oliveira is never sure-footed enough to stick with a single genre, and the music, which ranges from African to Portuguese pop and rock, only adds to the distraction. In Portuguese with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s documentary about U.S. soldiers of the 2/3 Field Artillery, stationed at a luxurious palace built by Saddam Hussein, is the first comprehensive film account I’ve seen of the Iraq occupation from the perspective of the soldiers; essentially this is their film. Most of the bullshit comes from Donald Rumsfeld, and no commentary is needed to clarify its inadequacy. I’m uncomfortable with how some of the narrative and musical strategies contrive to evoke Apocalypse Now, especially considering the filmmakers’ relative lack of illusions about the war. There are many rap performances, and the occasional editorializing includes one soldier’s ridicule of their flimsy Humvee armor. The film records many raids of Iraqi houses to find weapons and weapon makers; few of them are successful, though we’re offhandedly informed that several suspects were arrested and sent to Abu Ghraib anyway. No wonder some of the locals throw rocks. PG-13, 86 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
One should know as little as possible in advance about the plot of cinematographer Shona Auerbach’s subtle and graceful directorial debut, written by Andrea Gibb. So let’s just say that the main characters are a single mother (Emily Mortimer), her deaf nine-year-old son (Jack McElhone), his mysteriously absent father, a sailor hired by the mother to briefly impersonate the man, and the Scottish port setting. Considering this film and David MacKenzie’s Young Adam, an exciting new Scottish cinema may be taking shape. PG-13, 102 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
A young native of southern California (Alex Weed), who’s both a classical pianist and a club DJ, flies to Budapest with his Hungarian father to attend his grandfather’s funeral. While there he gets caught up in two local subculturesthe porn industry and the technopop rave sceneuntil those worlds disastrously collide. Hungarian writer-director Steven Lovy favors flashy jump cuts and a wildly roving camera, but eventually this settles down into a fairly entertaining youth movie with plenty of music. In English and subtitled Hungarian. 97 min. (JR) Read more
I barely remember Get Shorty (1995), in which Miami loan shark Chili Palmer (John Travolta) breaks into the criminal side of the movie business courtesy of Elmore Leonard, but it’s got to be better than this dumbass sequel that has him crashing the LA music scene. Travolta’s teamed up with an equally out of place Uma Thurman, and they’re the only ones the movie doesn’t ridicule. Director F. Gary Gray doesn’t have a clue about how to film this couple dancing, and Peter Steinfeld’s crude script confuses character with shtick while racing us through a story where loyalties and motivations turn on a dime. I was really glad when it was over. With Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, Andre Benjamin, Steven Tyler, Christina Milian, Harvey Keitel, Danny DeVito, and an uncredited James Woods. PG-13, 113 min. (JR) Read more
Film and video artist Jem Cohen (whose other work includes impressionistic documentaries on Fugazi and Elliott Smith) spent six years shooting this striking and potent 16-millimeter experimental feature in and around hundreds of malls, from Dallas to Berlin to Melbourne, and the fact that none of them can be placed or individuated is part of his point. A subtle mix of documentary and fiction, the film tells two separate stories about solitary women tied to these spaces: a 31-year-old Japanese executive (Hal Hartley regular Miho Nikaido) who’s studying the international theme-park industry for a corporation, and a young drifter (Mira Billotte of the New York band White Magic) who’s run away from home and is living and working illegally on the fringes of a mall. Both stories are interesting, though the latter is much more convincing; what makes the strongest impact is the superb documentary photography and the found audio segmentstelemarketing ads left as voice messages. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Iranian filmmaker Bahman Farmanara produced one of Abbas Kiarostami’s early features and won praise for his own work, including Prince Ehtejab (1974). But state officials began rejecting his film proposals in the mid-70s, and for much of the past 30 years he’s lived in the West. In this welcome comeback (2000) he plays a middle-aged director, rather like himself, who ruefully agrees to make a documentary about Iranian death rituals for Japanese TV. His wife has been dead five years (Farmanara’s wife, to whom he dedicated the film, was alive and well), and after discovering that their cemetery has planted someone else next to her, he has the strange experience of witnessing his own funeral, one of many fantasy sequences. This oddball comedy is full of wry asides and unexpected details; ultimately it’s more memorable for its ideas than its sounds and images, but it’s still fascinating and entertaining. In Farsi with subtitles. 93 min. Thu 3/10, 7 PM, Univ. of Chicago Doc Films. Read more
In her 1995 debut as writer-director, French actress Josiane Balasko (Too Beautiful for You, Grosse Fatigue) tries her hand at more political incorrectness. This very middle-class bisexual comedycalled Gazon Maudit in French and substantially censored by its American distributor, apparently under the assumption that we’re even more middle-class than the Frenchconcerns a frustrated housewife and mother (Pedro Almodovar regular Victoria Abril) who decides to get even with her philandering husband (Alain Chabat) by getting involved with another woman (Balasko), a stranger who happens by when her van breaks down. I loved Abril in this movie and liked Balasko, but though there was loud laughter all around me, I was only fitfully amused. In French with subtitles. 107 min. (JR) Read more
Playwright-actor-producer Tyler Perrya star of the so-called chitlin’ circuit, with eight shows currently credited to himadapts one of his hits for the big screen, directed by Darren R. Grant. The title heroine (Kimberly Elise)who’s angry, not crazyis dumped by her rich attorney husband (Steve Harris) for a white bimbo after 18 years of marriage; eventually she gets even and finds both true love (Shemar Moore) and her soul’s salvation. Perry plays her battle-ax grandmother Madea (featured in several Perry shows) as well as Madea’s lecherous brother and his upstanding son, and Cicely Tyson plays her mother. The stylistic discontinuities and pile-driver excesses can be off-putting for an outsider like me, but for fans this may well be part of the appeal. PG-13, 116 min. (JR) Read more
This gothic jigsaw puzzle, directed by John Maybury (Love Is the Devil) from a script by many hands, promises to be another Jacob’s Ladder but doesn’t deliver. Maybury’s art-world talents don’t include storytelling, and his visceral bursts of fast editing and extreme close-ups don’t yield any full-blown characters, narrative, or political vision (though I could swear I heard Noam Chomsky’s voice briefly coming from a TV). Leapfrogging between 1992 and 2007 and between fantasy and reality, the plot concerns an American GI (Adrien Brody) who nearly dies from a head wound during the first gulf war, gets framed for the murder of a cop back in his native Vermont, and winds up in a hospital for the criminally insane, where an evil shrink (Kris Kristofferson) performs hideous experiments on him. With Keira Knightley, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kelly Lynch, and music by Brian Eno. The executive producers include George Clooney and Steven Soderberghmaybe they can explain what’s going on. R, 104 min. (JR) Read more
A rarely screened early sound (1929) musical comedy adapted from the stage and featuring six-foot Charlotte Greenwood in the title role. (A silent version had been released nine years earlier.) An energetic, highly physical performer, Greenwood appeared later in such 50s musicals as Dangerous When Wet and Oklahoma. With Grant Withers, Patsy Ruth Miller, and Bert Roach. 64 min. (JR) Read more
In a small Florida town, the lonely ten-year-old daughter (AnnaSophia Robb) of a Baptist preacher (Jeff Daniels) adopts an unruly stray dog, which leads her to make friends with a few eccentric and equally lonely adultsa pet store clerk (rock star Dave Matthews), a librarian (Eva Marie Saint), and a reclusive alcoholic (Cicely Tyson). Wayne Wang (Smoke, The Joy Luck Club) directed this 2005 adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s book with a nice feeling for local color. Limiting the potential overripeness of the material (which periodically suggests Carson McCullers) with tact and sincerity, he generally makes the most of his resourceful cast; only the dog overacts. PG, 106 min. (JR) Read more
In a kind of neocolonial concession to the character typology of the Star Wars movies, this attractively animated dystopian SF from South Korean director-cowriter Moon Sang Kim, set in the year 2142, concentrates mainly on Western characters, with Asians relegated to the slots of wizened elders and comic relief. Also borrowing liberally from Metropolis (Escher-like futurist cityscapes) and the Mad Max trilogy (heavy-metal action), this is generally better with settings than with people, at least in the English version put together by Korean-born Sunmin Park. But that’s partly because effects of space and scale are among the triumphs of the high-definition multilayered animation employed. 87 min. (JR) Read more
The name above the title of this slick, fluffy romantic comedy is Will Smith, playing a Manhattan date doctor who advises shy guys on how to score. But with all due respect to Smith, the moviea performance piece with an unbelievable bare-bones plotbelongs to Kevin James (star of the TV show The King of Queens) as Hitch’s main client, a klutzy accountant who’s hopelessly in love with his wealthy socialite boss (Amber Valletta). This is a mannerist mugfest for all concerned, including Eva Mendes as a gossip columnist, but like the movie as a whole, James manages to be so light on his lumbering feet that it’s only natural for the film to culminate with his goofy dancing. Andy Tennant directed the script by Kevin Bisch. PG-13, 116 min. (JR) Read more
While it didn’t convince me to give up corn dogs, Ron Mann’s celebration of actor Woody Harrelson’s Simple Organic Living tour (a bus-and-bicycle caravan spreading the gospel of holistic living along the Pacific coast) is a highly entertaining form of ecological agitpropradical but accessible. Mann’s shrewdest ploy is to shift his focus from Harrelson to Steve Clark, his junk-food-addicted production assistant, whose comic encounters with strangers along the way look staged but purportedly weren’t. Great music and animation plus a pivotal cameo by Ken Kesey helped make this an audience favorite at the 2003 Toronto film festival. 100 min. (JR) Read more
